Drearier scenes are nowhere presented than these stony tundras, or their boundless swamps. Almost the only vegetation are a few gray lichens, a few dull blackish-looking mosses; the stunted flowers or crawling grasses that here and there occur do not relieve the uniform desolation,--they serve simply to enhance its gloomy character. In summer, indeed, the tundras are full of life; for the spawning instinct of the salmon and the sturgeon impels them to enter their rivers and seek the quiet recesses of their mysterious lakes. The reindeer assemble in numerous herds to feed on the herbage warmed into temporary vitality by the upward-slanting sun; the whirr of countless wings announces the coming of the migratory birds to breed, and feed their young, on the river-banks and the level shores; and in their trail arrive the eagle and the hawk, intent on prey. But with the first days of September a change passes over the scene. Animal life hastens to the more genial south; the birds abandon the frozen wastes; the reindeer retires to the shelter of the forests; the fish desert the ice-bound streams; and a terrible silence reigns in the desolate wilderness, broken only by the harsh yelp of a fox or the melancholy hooting of a snow-owl. For some eight or nine months a deep shroud or pall of snow lies on the whitened plains. No cheerful sunbeams irradiate it with a rosy glow; the sky is dull and dark; and it seems as if Nature had been abandoned to eternal Night. But blank and dreary as the limitless expanse of snow appears, it is the security of man in these far northern regions. It affords the necessary protection to the scanty vegetable life against the rigour of the long winter season. In Rensselaer Bay, Dr. Kane found, when the surface temperature had sunk to -30°, a temperature at two feet deep of -8°, at four feet deep of +2°, and at eight feet deep of +26°, or no more than 6° below freezing-point. Hence, underneath their thick frozen pall, the Arctic grasses and lichens maintain a struggling existence, and are able to maintain it until thoroughly resuscitated by the summer sun. It is owing to this wise and beneficent provision that, in the highest latitudes, the explorer discovers some feeble forms of vegetation. Thus, as Hartwig reminds us, Morton gathered a crucifer at Cape Constitution, in lat. 80° 45’ N.; and Dr. Kane, on the banks of the Minturn River, in lat. 78° 52’, met with a flower-growth which, though fully Arctic in its type, was gaily and richly coloured--including the purple lychnis, the starry chickweed, and the hesperis, among the festuca and other tufted grasses.